>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality<p>No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce steel in their back yards was overall much less productive than a few massive steel plants with dedicated professionals and experts on staff would've been.<p>Instead meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world, so that those who have more have earned it and those who have less earned that too. It is an impossible ideal, obviously, but the point is to strive for it always even knowing we can never reach it.<p>>As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve.<p>The problem with this hypothetical society isn't that the most meritorious have more wealth, but rather that they have <i>all</i> the wealth. Although those with the most merit do deserve a bigger slice of the pie (IMO anyway), they obviously don't deserve <i>all</i> the pie. One of the benefits of meritocracy is the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that isn't true if the top percent eats all the benefits of their own capital investments.<p>>The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth.<p>It's not a confusion, it's just how humans are wired. "Moron" originally had no negative connotation, but over time it gained a profound one. Similarly "plebeian" wasn't originally an insult, but now it is. Heck the ultimate evil force in most stories, the "villain", derives his name from the latin term for a low status farm hand (villanus)<p>Anything associated strongly with the "least efficient" rung of society will inevitably become tainted in this fashion, as human beings are inherently status-oriented creatures looking for some way to put down others and elevate ourselves. It's an unfortunate part of our nature as a species.
This article somewhat seems to assume that 'everyone is good at something' (although at the end it veers towards 'it doesn't matter if someone is good at anything', so it's a bit unclear at that). But anyway it seems that people only think that to make themselves feel good, as logic dictates otherwise. Say there are 10 traits in which one can be good (some of such traits are enumerated in the article, but let's say for the sake of the argument there are 10). They are more or less independently assigned; and if they're correlated at all, that correlation is positive (being good looking and athletic, for example). Then it follows there will always be people who are above average on more than 5 traits, and there will be people where it's the other way around. There will be people who are great at everything, and some who suck at everything. Yet I don't see that addressed in pieces like this. What is the counter argument from this school of thought?
“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin
All this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough questioning nowadays.<p>I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives.<p>Inequality can be described as one of the major drivers and consequences of progress that has in fact lifted all boats.<p>And if the best way for society to progress is to be extremely unequal and dictatorial (e.g. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in modern time; an AI-driven superdictatorship in the future; the Medici family launching the Renaissance in Florence in the distant past) then equality, democracy etc. should go away.<p>The best thinking on this subject recently came from Yuval Harari. Humans are biochemical machines that process information according to the laws of physics. So – what possible reason is there for us to value these biochemical machines all earning the same number of points on some abstract metric? And what happens when we build better machines? Or clone one person a trillion times?<p>The idea that equality to another human matters as much (or more) than technological progress, biological immortality, understanding the universe etc. is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. That cannot bear the idea that another monkey has more bananas or female monkeys.<p>fuck equality.
The conflict is simple: parents are stimulated to give the best upbringing possible to children - the prize is standing out the crowd - but at the same time it does not make much sense to be #1 in a wasteland.